This cartoon from The Seattle Times illustrates how America’s economic pizza is actually sliced per capita, highlighting the massive disparity between the Top 1%, the merely wealthy, the upper middle class, and the lower 50%.
This doesn’t show the severity of it.
A better pie chart would show:
~ The top 0.001%
~ Everyone else in the top 0.01%
~ Everyone else in the top 0.1%You’re likely already guessing how the pie looks with those groups figured in.
Note that absolutely everything above $30 million is pure capital. Its only purpose is to make more money.
Note that people this rich can do a lot of incompetent and heinous stuff and still fail upwards.
Note that a considerable number of the ultra-wealthy think of working class humans as NPCs and would rather replace us all with machines that cost twice as much to maintain.
why a ban?
Mod log just says “Ban evasion, repeated violations of ToS” across a few dozen coms. I guess mods got sick of them.
I’ve noticed lately a lot of mods are banning people posting a lot. Which is really fucking stupid because they are removing the people creating interaction. Even if they are just copy and pasting from reddit. A) who cares, b) many people here aren’t on reddit, and c) the mods are going to kill their own communities if they keep this up.
There was recently a discussion about this from someone who crossposts stuff from reddit to lemmy and got banned for it. Opinions vary but it’s mostly anti reddit. Can’t find it now though. Myself I’m not sure. Importing trends and “reinforcement learning” or manufacturing cons(t)ent from reddit is problematic. But it’s not like most lemmies aren’t already trained like good little dogs to be neoliberal imperialists. I mostly see the same shite trending on lemmy as on reddit.
It definitely is hilarious that the top post on lemmy currently has double banned tags lol
I dont know about hilarious. The largest lemmy instance banning users for posting content they dont like from reddit? Thats more than just stupid. Its a message what Lemmy is becoming. When Reddit is more free than Lemmy, we have sad days ahead on this social network.
Exactly, they’re cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. No one ever learns.
Lemmy.world, that’s why.
He can post on other instances like Lemmy.today but it doesn’t get the same amount of viewers.
When the largest instance is ban happy (I guess Americans?), it’s going to be controlling the entire Lemmy network.
This sort of thing is not even banned on reddit.
Looked through this sub-Lemmy’s front page.
#Unban_sanitation
As a top 1 percenter, I feel seriously offended by the suggestion that I’d sit anywhere close peasants, let alone at the same table.
/s obviously, because I wouldn’t be on lemmy if I was anywhere close the top 1%
Actually the top 1% in the US is ~600k per year. It’s a lot of cash but not entirely outside the realm of possibility for some extremely senior software architect/manager combo at some VC startup, which is also within the lemmy target audience.
~600k per year
Why are you using income? It’s wealth that matters and that’s a ~$16M cutoff.
To reach that you’d need to be earning ~600k per year for 2-3 decades, to invest the majority of it, and to get absurd stock returns on top of that.
Which is still, just insane to think about.
Like holy crap I can hardly imagine seeing 4 dollar-digits of liquidity in my account. In my lifetime, and I think I work hard in a role in society like anybody else.
Something like that would require the most unlikely of windfalls. To think there’s people out there, somewhat “commonly”, going “Hmmm yerrs, let’s put $20k into these stonks. Indeeed…”
…and then they reap returns, and go on and start businesses with “risk” (but not much, proportionally) and then publish books about “quitting the rat race and following your dreams.”
And they might be a few zip codes away from me. It’s nuts to me. Incomprehensible, really. Just…damn.
I don’t wanna be rich, that sounds awful. I just wanna stop forever bracing against the next inevitable-but-untimeable calamity that threatens to throw us all out on the street.
Like holy crap I can hardly imagine seeing 4 dollar-digits of liquidity in my account. In my lifetime, and I think I work hard in a role in society like anybody else.
What do you mean by 4 dollar-digits of liquidity? Like $1000? That feels a bit low unless you’re in a country where the yearly income is 1-2K.
…and then they reap returns, and go on and start businesses with “risk” (but not much, proportionally) and then publish books about “quitting the rat race and following your dreams.”
It’s even lower than you’d think. The cutoff for basically never needing to work again in your life is around $1M so top 18% of the US. At that point as long as you’re willing to live off 30-40K and invest in index funds statistically you’ll only ever get wealthier. (at least historically for the last several decades)
Haha yeah sorry I was struggling to convey that properly. US American here.
Like, after the paycheck comes in, and we pay all the bills, yeah having some 1000’s just left over to decide what to do with would be quite cushy.
We’re a couple that both work decently paying part times. Living with family makes that possible, but unavoidable debts (and climbing insurance rates) the last few years balanced it out.
So I mean, we live comfortably and we’re materially content. But also times are really scary where another 2008 could hit us real bad.
So it’s still weird imagining people just having lots of padding floating around. Lol
I gather this is roughly true wrt income (other estimates place this closer to 750k per household), but not wealth (which i believe is ~14 million to be in the top 1% in the US). Note that this income estimate does not include unrealized capital gains and that a 10% return on a 14 million portfolio is 1.4 million per year in passive income.
Most people in the lower 50% believe that anyone that has any money, especially $1M+ is part of the 1%. The complete lack of understanding of income and wealth escalation in the last couple decades is what keeps many people voting against their own interests. Many $1M-aires believe that with the right government policy and lower taxes, always lower taxes, they would quickly become part of the 1% and be “just like Musk”. They believe that the system that aides and abets billionaires would equally benefit themselves and cannot see that they are part of the riff raff, the same as a homeless person, in the eyes of the billionaire class.
Wealth concentration today is 3x worse than at the height of the gilded age.
Financial obesity is neurotoxic, an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
I may be willing to accept other more straightforward methods.
The people with crumbs STILL doing nothing despite having nothing to lose will allow America to be destroyed.
How about a different kinda slicing?
Americans let children die in schools to gun violence for decades just so they can uphold the 2nd amendment which by definition doesn’t even guarantee access to guns to common civilians, but hide in the corner when their way of life is being taken away from them day by day because “They have guns too and I’m a pussy”.
The USA is 350 million fucking cowards, and they deserve what is happening.
Nice job homogenizing 350 million people. Every single one the same and deserving of ridicule. Sure.
…says someone who laments gun violence while encouraging gun violence.
Obvious point being: lawful gun owners do not support gun violence.
If America actually had a civil war this person would write off everyone involved as “toxic and obsessed with violence.” I’ve dealt with folks like this before; they just want to differentiate themselves from Americans so that they can feel safe from what’s happening in America, and like it won’t happen to them. Really not too different from any other kind of victim blaming
It’s easy for people like me to differentiate myself from other Americans, considering that I am not American.
Nothing they said advocated gun violence.
They might have meant a peaceful shutdown.
They said the population is cowed, to put it more nicely. They’re correct.
I’ll paraphrase what I see: “Americans have guns but are too afraid to use them.” That certainly reads to me like inciting violence.
I take issue with the lower class being illustrated as overweight
He looks normal sized
Correct: Americans are normally obese.
But US lower class is overweight. Artist was too kind, should add another 40 lb
Conservatives insist this is the only way. As long as conservatives exist, the normal people will never be permitted to regulate capitalism or charge billionaires with crimes.
We must delete the foot-soldiers to defeat the billionaire class.
I just want a new season of Reacher where he goes undercover as a gay prostitute.
We need a The Expanse crossover with that Wesley guy. Watch me not have remembered his name right - the one who can walk in heels 😂
Ah, yes, this is only an issue in the US… And also, nothing other than the US matters or exists.
Little bit of data for you:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#range:1989.4,2026.2
That graph makes me sick
And Americans still refuse to do anything about it.
More accurately, the lower 50% is forced to fight over some cheese stuck to the lid and the grease- soaked bottom of the cardboard box.
Missed opportunity to have the lower %50 portrayed as extremely obese. That is how we are taught I feel, that the poor are actually lazy moochers taking instead of contributing.
Which isn’t true to be clear
There is in fact a problem with the lower income families having food deserts, having not enough money for fresh produce, and having to rely on mostly hyper processed foods which fuck with your insulin levels, have tons of sugar, fats and salts to make them tasty, and that leads to irregular fat storage even when you’re taking a normal or sub normal level of calories. It’s one of the reasons the “fat American” body type is showing up in other nations, particularly in Europe, where they’re also becoming more reliant on ultra processed foods. Being poor is more expensive in many ways, and one is that you can’t afford a good diet and it makes you sicker faster while you lack the healthcare to manage it or find education on the matter via a primary care provider.
There has to be more to it than that. I was watching something about an area near me being one of the fattest in the country. Its moderately deprived which I am sure is a contributing factor, but then less than 100 miles away another town which is far more deprived is around 10% lower for obesity.
They interviewed people too, asking them where they get food from. So many said the same answer, a shop which is entirely stocked with processed crap. Yes, if you go shopping there you are coming home with crap. But next door there were 2 other shops which sell fresh vegetables and for less than the ultra processed crap. It takes less than 10 seconds to walk between the doors of each shop.
Its not a food desert, fresh food is available here and cheaper than processed food. I spend less on food for the week than many people do on a single takeaway, of which they have several a week.
When you’re working two jobs to survive, you do not have time to cook from scratch.
When education fails to educate, you do not have knowledge how to cook, nor understanding of the reason why one might want to.
Microbiome differences will absolutely account for that. I’d be testing for soil and water issue differences and checking if one has more time spent in third spaces that help foster more healthy and diverse microbiomes. Just having more park time would do it, but absolutely having more gardening in one vs the other would do that, even with the exact same diet
Well I know the water here has as much agricultural fertiliser in it as they are legally allowed to leave in.
The other component is time. When someone works multiple jobs, the thought of going home and spending an hour cooking and half an hour cleaning up just to eat in ten minutes is very unappealing when there’s so much else to be done. Simply having the food available for cheap doesn’t do any good when you don’t have time to cook it and don’t want salad.
